Rollwald camp
The Rollwald prison camp existed from 1938 until the end of the Second World War in the then independent community of Nieder-Roden , now part of the town of Rodgau , in the former district of Dieburg in Hesse . Former prisoners of war were temporarily housed in the camp between 1945 and 1950 . During this period, the authorities of the American military government used the camp as an archive, whose card index recorded German prisoners of war.
Geographical location
The area is located southwest of Nieder-Roden in the Main Plain . The name Rollwald is derived from an old field name. The area was forested, partly swampy, partly sandy and not very fertile. At a depth of three to seven meters, a one-meter-thick layer of clay prevents precipitation from draining into deeper layers.
The old Reichsstraße 45, coming from Dieburg, ran through Nieder-Roden since 1889, as did the Rodgau Railway since 1896 . Both traffic routes connected the area with the cities of Offenbach am Main and Hanau to the north of it and are still available today, with a modified route, as federal highway 45 and S-Bahn S1 .
Community of participants
In the spring of 1938, the Rodgau community of participants was founded, which, as an association, had set itself the task of clearing the fields in almost 40 communities in the Dieburg and Offenbach districts according to the ideas of the state planning. Right from the start, the intention was to use prisoners from all over what was then Reich territory to carry out this project , since one year before the start of the Second World War there was no longer any surplus labor available in Germany and no skilled workers were required for the work on clearing the fields. Rather, anyone could be called upon to be taught how to use a shovel and pickaxe.
The Nieder-Roden location for the planned prison camp was chosen because of its central location between Offenbach and Dieburg and the good transport routes that were already in place.
Construction of the camp
First of all, the pine, oak and beech trees had to be cut down on the 200 acres of forest area provided for the planned warehouse . The income from the sale of wood, which is said to have been 750,000 Reichsmarks , was placed in a blocked account with the municipality and expired in 1948 due to the currency reform . On the 250 × 190 meter core area of the cleared area, 16 large wooden barracks were hastily built, and a further eight were added later. They housed the prisoners' quarters as well as the kitchen, dining rooms, infirmary and other functional rooms, including a bar for the guards in addition to the guard. Camp punishments were carried out in a massive building with 60 individual cells (detention house). Several detached houses were available for the security personnel.
The construction work was carried out by 500 prisoners. This number comes from a circular from the Reich Ministry of Justice dated June 22, 1938 (signed by the prosecutor at the People's Court, Roland Freisler ), which was sent to all public prosecutors . In this letter it is mentioned that the Rollwald camp has been in operation since April 1938 , that there were already 500 prisoners there by this time and that an expansion to a capacity for around 3500 prisoners is being considered.
The circular continues to say that in the course of 1938 a larger number of massive residential buildings should be built for the prison officers who will soon be deployed in the camp . For this you need prisoners who were builders by profession or who could be trained as bricklayers. The recruitment of these 280 people in total would have to come from 25 prisons in the Reich.
However, it is not known whether this number of specialists was actually transferred to the Rollwald camp. By 1939, a total of 24 single-family houses had been built outside the camp core area and a swimming pool on the camp site for the security personnel. The planned expansion of the camp to include accommodations for 3,500 prisoners was not implemented.
Structure and tasks
The Rollwald camp was the main camp II of the Rodgau-Dieburg camp (main camp I). Later, the main camp III in Eich near Alzey was set up especially for male Polish prisoners. More than 20 external commands were assigned to the camp network. These branch offices were distributed over the whole of central and southern Hesse as far as the neighboring Rhineland-Palatinate .
In the 47,500 m² core area of the camp, 15 barracks were intended to house inmates, which were arranged in three blocks with five barracks each. 100 men were housed in each barrack. The barracks were made by inmates in Dieburger Lager I on a specially prepared carpenter's place. The camp was secured by a four-fold, three-meter-high barbed wire fence.
From the beginning of the war in 1939, there were around 1,500 prisoners and 200 guards in the Rollwald camp as permanent occupation. The detained prisoners came from all parts of Germany and the occupied territories. Information provided by the International Tracing Service in Arolsen in June 1980 shows that there were also prisoners of Belgian, French, Luxembourg and Norwegian nationality. The prisoners came to work in Nieder-Roden and its near and far surroundings, where they were transported by lorry if the locations were too far to walk. They laid drainage pipes , paved, straightened or changed the banks of streams and rivers, laid paths and prepared cultivation areas.
Two hereditary farms , each with 120 acres of field , were also built on the cleared area of the rolling forest . Various artificial fertilizers were tested here, which IG Farben made available for test purposes free of charge. Beyond the Rodau, four more hereditary farms were to be built, which were no longer built as a result of the war. The already cleared areas were reforested after the war.
Led the prisoners initially Meliorations - and settlement projects from, they were from 1942 in particular as workers in the defense industry employed.
Subcamp
The prisoners had to do forced labor not only in the vicinity. Therefore, several satellite camps were set up, the first in the spring of 1939 in Schlitz (Vogelsbergkreis) . There were other satellite camps with 15 to 200 inmates in Abenheim, Allmendfeld (Gernsheim), Aumühle, Griesheim, Hermsheim, Hessenaue, Klein-Gerau, Lorsch, Riedshäuser Hof, Schwanheim, Weiterstadt and Wöllstein. Some of these subcamps only existed for a short time. Rollwald prisoners were also deployed at the Kelsterbach, Kirtorf, Lich, Schotten and Viernheim forest offices.
Imprisoned
Over the years, more than 10,000 men were incarcerated in the Rollwald prison camps. The evaluation of a random sample from the prisoner register showed that around 58 percent of the prisoners were imprisoned for crimes against property or property; around 14 percent were non-resident, 11 percent homosexual. Politically or religiously motivated crimes were reported in less than ten percent of the prisoners.
In 1938, tennis player Gottfried von Cramm , a member of the German Davis Cup team , sentenced to one year in prison for homosexuality , was sent to the Rollwald camp. After half a year in prison, he was released for good conduct. Although originally only criminal offenders were to be imprisoned in the Rollwald camp, after the start of the war, more and more politically persecuted people were transferred here. The Austrian conscientious objector Anton Brugger , a member of the Reform Adventists , was a prisoner in the Rollwald camp from 1941 before he was murdered as a religiously motivated conscientious objector in the Brandenburg prison on February 3, 1943 . The Slavist and historian Wolfgang Leppmann was sentenced to two and a half years in prison in January 1943 for so-called “ racial disgrace ” and imprisoned for a short time in the Rollwald camp. Treated as a Jew under the Nuremberg Laws , he was deported to Auschwitz via Darmstadt and Berlin on May 6, 1943 , and murdered there on September 14, 1943. That the later chairman of the SPD parliamentary group in the Bundestag and deputy national chairman of the SPD Fritz Erler was also in the Rollwald camp during his seven-year imprisonment cannot be proven with certainty.
Camp cemetery
More than 200 people died in the Rollwald camp. A total of 156 prisoner deaths from the Rollwald camp are recorded in the registry office of the city of Rodgau. In the years 1938 to 1943 there was the comparatively small number of only nine deaths; they were buried in the cemetery in Nieder-Roden. From 1944 onwards, however, mortality rose noticeably, a consequence of the general deterioration in the food situation in the fifth year of the war. In addition, large numbers of very weak elderly people were imprisoned in the Rollwald camp. In the years 1944 and 1945, 147 camp inmates died, 110 of whom were buried in a new camp cemetery that had been set up south of the camp in the municipality. 37 corpses were given to the anatomical department of the University of Gießen or relatives picked up for burial in their hometown.
After the war, a violent dispute broke out between the Nieder-Roden community and the Dieburg district over the assumption of the maintenance costs for the camp cemetery. One tried in vain to subordinate him to the war grave welfare organization, since Nieder-Roden did not see himself as the client for the construction of the new cemetery. However, it could not be proven that prisoners were buried here who had been convicted solely on political or religious grounds. Only then would the war graves service have taken over the care of the graves. According to the current legal situation , a large number of the judgments issued at the time, which were based on special National Socialist laws, would have to be declared invalid and the victims no longer denigrated as “criminal”.
After more and more exhumations and transfers of the dead to their homeland took place in the following period, the site was finally leveled after 1964.
Use after the end of the war
American troops marched into Nieder-Roden on March 26, 1945. They also occupied the place and the Rollwald camp. The care of the prisoners suddenly improved. After examining each individual case, the American military administration released most of the prisoners within a short period of time. In May 1945 there were still 86 prisoners from the Rollwald camp in the Dieburg prison, in September there were still 27. Some criminal cases were later renegotiated in front of a German post-war poem.
From August 1945, around 500 former SS members were temporarily interned in the Rollwald camp. After a few months of vacancy, the Prisoner of War Information Bureau (PWIB) was set up in Rollwald . From the end of 1946 onwards, around 300 prisoners of war processed the central Allied prisoner-of-war index for Germany. The supervisory staff and former prisoners of war, who lived in the east and had come with the Allies from France, lived in the detached houses that had been cleared by the prison guards from the prison camp.
At the end of 1949, the Allies stopped work in Rollwald and released the residential buildings. Shortly afterwards, the Rodgau community of participants sold these houses to private individuals. The two hereditary estates also went into private ownership. With the exception of the massive detention center, which also went into private hands, all buildings of the core camp were removed. The bell of the camp church was kept and moved in 1971 in the bell tower of today's Rollwälder Heilig-Kreuz-Chapel. The pool was used by Americans and Germans until 1950, when it was filled in over the years. Today the Rollwälder Kindergarten is located here.
For further use after the end of the war, see Rollwald
Historical processing
The Protestant youth of the Rodgau deanery began in 1980 to deal with the effects of National Socialism in the region as part of the “Search for traces” campaign. With a provisional memorial stone on the former camp cemetery, the young people brought the Rollwald camp into public awareness. In 1981 the city council set up a working group to investigate the history of the camp. Local researcher Heinz Sierian summarized the first results of this work in an interim report. After his death in 1983, the research soon stopped. The Offenbach district council also refused to commission an investigation.
Ten years later the topic came back into the public eye. Under the direction of the Protestant youth of the dean's office, pupils of the Heinrich Böll School developed an exhibition entitled "Rollwald Camp - Moments of Remembrance", which was shown in November 1993. In the same year a "Working Group Rollwald" was founded; she organized an annual memorial service in the following years.
At the beginning of 2000, the association was founded to deal with the history of the Rollwald camp . After the end of the limitation period in 1995, all relevant files in the Darmstadt State Archives had become freely accessible. After almost four years of research on behalf of the association, historian Heidi Fogel presented the results as a book in November 2004: The Rollwald Camp. Penitentiary system and forced labor 1938 to 1945 .
The sponsoring association dissolved in 2005 after its purpose was fulfilled. Since then, the Rodgau Association for Multinational Understanding has kept memories alive. He also manages the website of the former friends' association.
memorial
After a lengthy political dispute, the city of Rodgau erected a memorial stone in 1983 on the former site of the camp cemetery. It bears the inscription:
Here rest people who were imprisoned in the Rollwald prison camp
during the difficult
times of National Socialism and who suffered senseless deaths from hunger and illness in 1944/45 . Do not judge so that you will not be judged. Matthew VII, verse I.
Every year, a memorial ceremony takes place at the memorial stone on Memorial Day.
In 2018 the city of Rodgau had the small, park-like facility redesigned into a memorial. The multilingual information boards that were set up in 2014 were also integrated. Dirk Melzer's planning picks up on historical symbols: two crossing paths with yellow surfaces are reminiscent of the yellow crosses on the prisoners' trousers. Steles with stylized barbed wire symbolize the fencing of the former camp. Blooming daffodils mark the locations of some graves in spring. Three black crosses made of sheet steel resemble the simple tombs on the former camp cemetery.
See also
literature
- Lothar Bembenek: The prison camp Rollwald Nieder-Roden , in: The Greens in the Landtag (Hessen) , Frankfurt am Main, 1984
- Michael Jäger: I was already person to person , in: Displaced and forgotten: On the history of forced labor in Rodgau , Pfaffenweiler, 1991
- Werner Stolzenburg: From the forest to the settlement. Origin and life of the Rollwald settlement , Frankfurt am Main, 1992
- Heidi Fogel: The Rollwald camp. Penitentiary system and forced labor 1938 to 1945 , Association for the development of the history of the Rollwald camp (ed.), Rodgau, 2004, ISBN 3-00-013586-3
Web links
- Former support association for the historical processing of the history of the Rollwald camp
- Biography of Wolfgang Johannes Leppmann
- Eyewitness report from an inmate
- Rodgau, criminal prisoner camp “Lager Rollwald”, main camp II. Topography of National Socialism in Hesse (as of December 4, 2015). In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS). Hessian State Office for Historical Cultural Studies (HLGL), accessed on June 27, 2016 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Heidi Fogel: The Rollwald camp. Penitentiary system and forced labor 1938 to 1945 . Funding association for the historical processing of the history of the Rollwald camp, Rodgau 2004, ISBN 3-00-013586-3 , p. 72 ff .
- ↑ Heidi Fogel: The Rollwald camp. Penitentiary system and forced labor 1938 to 1945 . Funding association for the historical processing of the history of the Rollwald camp, Rodgau 2004, ISBN 3-00-013586-3 , p. 143 ff .
- ↑ Heidi Fogel: The Rollwald camp. Penitentiary system and forced labor 1938 to 1945 . Funding association for the historical processing of the history of the Rollwald camp, Rodgau 2004, ISBN 3-00-013586-3 , p. 221 .
- ↑ Heidi Fogel: The Rollwald camp. Penitentiary system and forced labor 1938 to 1945 . Funding association for the historical processing of the history of the Rollwald camp, Rodgau 2004, ISBN 3-00-013586-3 , p. 339 ff .
- ↑ Heidi Fogel: The Rollwald camp. Penitentiary system and forced labor 1938 to 1945 . Funding association for the historical processing of the history of the Rollwald camp, Rodgau 2004, ISBN 3-00-013586-3 , p. 13 ff .
- ↑ Ekkehard Wolf: Penal camp in Rollwald: The long way to the memorial. In: op-online.de. Offenbach-Post, January 11, 2019, accessed on May 31, 2020 .
- ↑ Werner Stolzenburg: From the forest to the settlement. Origin and life of the Rollwald settlement . Frankfurt 1992, p. 36 .
- ↑ Tablets against oblivion . In: Offenbach-Post . March 28, 2014, p. 29 .
- ↑ Memorial on the site of the former camp cemetery. Association for Multinational Understanding Rodgau, accessed on May 29, 2020 .
- ↑ A new face for the memorial . In: Offenbach-Post . November 16, 2017, p. 11 .
Coordinates: 49 ° 59 ′ 25.1 ″ N , 8 ° 50 ′ 41.9 ″ E
